View Camera Still Life, 2002-2008
Grouped chronologically (somewhat arbitrarily, as what I do evolves very slowly), these images were made with the 4"x5" view camera using film in all but one case, in which a digital back was used. This last one, the "Untitled (Three Compartments with Golf Ball)" is a transitional still life in two ways: it was the first one made with digital means instead of analog, and it was the first one made by photographing the subject in sections and then reassembling them with the computer to make an extra-large image file.
This procedure developed out of what I had already done with a few subjects using the view camera - photographing the subject in sections to create a multi-paneled photograph, with each panel printed separately, and with the possibility also of combining the digital scans of the separate panels to create an oversized, seamless image. Two examples are right here in this section, the "Diptych (Chest)" and Triptych (Ring, Spiral, Puppet)". Another, the "Diptych (Arrangement with Beeswax IV)", is in the next section, "Prime Arrangements 1997-2001".
These images exist in limited editions of fifteen signed and numbered prints of any size and any type of print, whether traditional analog (silver-gelatin or baryte prints) or digital (pigment prints) in nearly all cases. (The sole exception here is the last and most recent image, "Three Compartments with Golf Ball", id#855, which is limited to ten signed and numbered prints of any size or type.) Of the editions limited to fifteen, they consist principally of gelatin-silver prints (as they were made when I still routinely made traditional prints and had not yet adopted the use of a digital pigment printer), sized mainly to a format of 16" x 20" or 11" x 14". In most cases, I have not completed the edition in gelatin-silver, but I have begun to do this with many images by making digital pigment prints in A3Plus, not to exceed a total of fifteen.
For an artist's statement regarding these images, see the last menu item in this section, "The Persistence of Memory - Still-Life Essay".
© 2014 Allen Schill. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or used without prior written permission from the author. Anyone is welcome to link to it, or to quote brief passages, but I would like to be notified.